Conversation Rate, Not Conversion Rate

Pretend you want to get together for a poker game with your friends. You send out an email to the gang. Some of your friends respond immediately. Others need to check their calendars. Still others just don’t do emails. It could take several rounds of emails, phone calls, tweets, Facebook invites or in-person communications to get everyone together.

In terms of setting up the poker game you don’t say: “I had a 32% response rate from my buddies,” and leave it at that. Heck no. These are people who have taken plenty of your quarters and it’s your chance to win them back!

You are highly motivated and instead of giving up after one communication, you reach them through whatever means possible. Hopefully you get a commitment from enough of your friends to make poker night happen and no matter how many attempts you make, at the end of the day, you either got a hold of them or you don't.

The goal of all communications should be to get through to somebody and make a connection, but we all know that it sometimes takes more than one attempt, even if that somebody is a good friend.

What do we mean by the term “conversation rate?” When people first see it, they may think it’s a misspelling of “conversion rate.” It is similar, but it also has a distinct difference that separates it from “conversion rate,” and the almost interchangeable “response rate.” Let’s take a closer look:

Conversion Rate: In the simplest of terms, conversion rate is a marketing term that is the percent of people to whom you send a message and then take a desired action.

Response Rate: Similar to a conversion rate, response rate is also a marketing and survey term that's basically a ratio determined by the following formula: people who respond to a message divided by the total number of people to whom you send a message.

Pretty much the same…

What both conversion rate and response rate do not address is timing and continuity with other messages. It’s not their fault though. There is nothing in their definitions that excludes them from being applied to multiple messages over time, but it turns out that most corporate communication efforts are isolated and event-oriented, such as a product launch. Even so called “campaigns” are generally closely clustered events often disconnected from other communication efforts to the same group of people. When was the last time you aggregated your response rates or conversion rates over different media types across an entire year's worth of communications? If you do, congratulations, because you're part of a very elite club.

Conversation Rate: Think of conversation rate the same way you think about getting a hold of your friend for poker. Your metric is simply: “Did I have the conversation or not?”

If you're thinking, “Wait a second…measuring distinct communications is important!” Well, you’re right. Be relevant to your friend’s communication preference. If one of your friends never opens their email, then you probably shouldn’t send them emails. Use a medium that they respond to, but that's a tactical lesson. The strategy is to connect with your friend.

It's important to measure on the message level so that you stop doing the things that don’t work for that friend, and do more of the things that do work, which is actually one more point of distinction…sense and respond.

It should be noted that in order to effectively measure conversation rates you need to have a robust system that can connect all your communication efforts and sense and respond to overall trends and individual preferences of each person you want to talk to.

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Sight Marketing creates business relevance by connecting companies with their customers. To learn more about how Sight can help you connect with your customers, email us or give us a call at 651-646-2442.